How can I find all R packages that include graphics functions?

I always have difficulty in finding all available alternative ways to produce a specific graph, either one that I have already decided to use (looking for different variations) or one that I have not yet thought of.

The R Graphical Manual site provides a complete list of samples of R's graphics functions, however it's easier for me to search providing a package n开发者_如何学Goame (how else -for example- can I get a resultset including superbarplot function, when I want to look for barplots?. Let alone that the superbarplot graph does not appear in the results even if I try searching for it's package: UsingR)

The R-SAS-SPSS Add-on Module Comparison - and especially on topic Graphics, Static in the table provided - gave me the idea that it would be nice to have a place where all relevant packages are listed by topic.

Do you have any idea about something like that?

If you're interested in learning about all the possible graphics you can make, you should learn about the grammar of graphics, and (my) implementation of it in R: ggplot2.

Your question, or the general pattern anyway, was clearly a primary use case for the design of the sos package.

sos actually goes one step further that your question requires by identifying particular functions with packages; in addition, it ranks the results by relevance (by default, you can change the default behavior via the "sortby" parameter, e.g., sortby="Date")

Here's how it works:

most of this package's functionality is exposed via the "findFn" command

for instance, if you want a list of all functions and the parent package related to scatter plots:

findFn("scatter plot", maxPages=2, sortby="TotalScore")

This returns a dataframe formatted as HTML table and delivered in your default browser (if you don't want it to pop-up immediately, then just bind the function call to a variable and then call the variable when you're ready)

The right-most column of the dataframe/HTML page is "Description and Link". Clicking an entry in that column opens another tab in your browser (according to the user-set preferences set in your browser) with the complete R help page for that function.

The results from the function call above show, for instance, that the functions for plotting data in a 'scatter plot' format are found in the following packages:

• ade4 (function: scatter)
• IDPmisc (functions: ipairs, iplots)
• GGally (function: ggally_points)
• PerformanceAnalytics (function: chart.Scatter)
• mclust (function: clPairs)

Another example:

findFn("boxplot", maxPages=2, sortby="TotalScore")

identifies these (among others) packages/functions for plotting boxplots:

• sfsmisc (function: boxplot.matrix)
• aplpack (function: boxplot2D)
• NADA (function: boxplot-methods)
• StatDA (function: rg.boxplot)
• plotrix (function: gap.boxplot)
• gplots (function: boxplot.n)
• multcompView (function: multcompBoxplot)
• oligo (function: boxplot)

Have you seen the R Graph Gallery ?

Other than that, you may have to index all the source code of CRAN packages to search efficiently...

these are good memory-joggers. I second the ggplot2 recommend, also recommend looking thru CRAN views:

http://cran.r-project.org/web/views/

http://cran.fhcrc.org/web/views/Graphics.html

(this mirror seems faster in west coast US)

http://dataspora.com/archive/2009/seminar/Survey_of_R_Graphics_by_Driscoll_Dataspora_Jun2009.pdf

http://zoonek2.free.fr/UNIX/48_R/04.html

(possibly world's longest webpage)

http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~ihaka/120/lectures.html

Ihaka's lectures notes